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rComplex puts the player in the role of a running man in a non-stop dash to safety as a mysterious, almost omnipresent darkness slowly approaches him with malicious intentions. The game is all about running away as quickly as you can while dodging obstacles and using any firepower you have to hinder your pursuer.

Little is known about the situation, characters, or surroundings when the player is thrown into the game world and immediately hits the ground running, escaping from impending danger. The player character desperately tries to piece together the events that led to this situation in his mind, attempting to live long enough to make sense of it all, in medias res fashion.

Controls and game mechanics are introduced early and briefly to the player, integrated into the game world without interrupting the action. The game has a clean visual style utilizing a bold mix of black and various colors to describe the game world in a vague way using silhouettes and parallaxing.

The original rComplex is a short PC game demo developed by a two man indie team with the intention of being entered into the IGF 2010 contest. The game began development just eight days before the IGF deadline and was submitted just in time. The rComplex demo project had gained a fair amount of attention. It was featured on IndieGames Blog, GameTrailers, in Total PC Gaming Magazine, and on Bytejacker where it won best free indie game of the week on episode #66 and was nominated for best free indie game of the year for 2010 on episode #109; it even had a short film based on it, created by Zenithfilms. Now we’re planning to expand hugely upon the original concept and bring it to various iOS devices.

We want to release our game on the app store for iOS devices and follow up with Android, Windows, and Mac releases if it does well. We feel that the gameplay mechanics of rComplex are perfect for mobile devices and that the visual style will suit the small screens well, where it can be difficult to discern objects in games sometimes. Unity is a great engine that will allow for us to easily deploy to iOS devices and port assets if need be.

Since our initial development phase, we’ve had a year to expand on the game concept and brainstorm exciting scenarios and different ways to play; we have the motivation to turn rComplex into a full-length game, however, we require additional resources and approximately 3-4 months of development time to make it a reality.

The original rComplex was created in Panda3d, but we’ll be using Unity for this project. From our experiences with Unity so far, it is incredible and really helps to speed up our workflow while still creating a polished product. We’ll need funding to be able to purchase the appropriate licenses for Unity, missing hardware that is essential to development and deployment, and various promotional opportunities to help us market the game when it comes time for it to compete in the app store.

Above all, we want to deliver a thrilling action game experience.

Our development team consists of Roger Hicks, who is responsible for all of the programming and composing of music, and Brian Terwilliger, who creates all of the art assets and is liable for the game’s design. Despite living states apart, we work together and communicate well over the internet; our past games include rComplex, Stream, Project I/O, and Wings of Apocalypse, all of which are available to play for free on PC.

We love games; we love to play games and we love creating them. We recognize the present value and future potential of the medium, as both interactive entertainment and as a form of art that allows for choice on the player’s behalf. Being such a small development team has been a great experience for us so far, it allows both of us to have a lot of jurisdiction in every matter that arises.

If this project is successfully funded, it will represent our first foray into the app store as well as our first game on a mobile device; regardless of outcome, the experience will be enriching for both of us. We want to continue creating games, each outdoing the last, and venture into different genres and styles. It is a lot of hard work, but to be able to make a living developing these games would be extraordinary.

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